Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 69772 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69772 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
My heart all but soared at her words.
She’d never been that absolute before.
She’d always been very wishy-washy when it came to her brother.
But the way she sounded right then, my heart was doing that weird palpitation/racing thing it liked to do when I thought maybe she’d give me a chance…
“How done?” I asked.
“Done enough that if you were to arrest him, I probably wouldn’t care.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at me.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.
“Because you put your brother in Costas’s path and didn’t warn me to watch out for him. Do you realize what would have happened if Costas had found out?” she whisper hissed.
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “You know that I can’t warn you about stuff like that.”
“Yeah, and if something had happened to him, and I could’ve prevented it, then I would never forgive you,” she claimed.
I sighed, allowing my head to fall back. “I didn’t have a choice. It’s my job, Shayne. I can’t pick and choose which rules to follow. You, better than most, should know this.”
She looked away.
“Order number 123!” a voice called from directly behind us.
I rolled my eyes, caught the bag up from the man, and looked into it to make sure we had everything.
We didn’t.
“You’re missing her chicken wings,” I said matter-of-factly.
The man rolled his eyes, as if I’d just caused him great harm, and ambled off to get them.
“Glad you checked,” Shayne muttered darkly.
I could tell she was glaring at the man.
If there was one woman on this planet who took her food seriously, it was Shayne.
I’d never seen a woman get so bent out of shape when it came to the things she ate.
God help us if the man had forgotten, and we’d gotten all the way to her place, and she couldn’t eat them.
“Me, too,” I agreed as the man came back with the wings.
I counted them to make sure they were all there, then we headed out, back to her place.
We passed by mine, and then she was back to asking about my new place. “Why did you move?”
I explained about the house I’d had built—one that was extremely close to what she’d told me she wanted when we were younger.
“My brothers and I all bought parcels of land,” I explained. “We liked the setup that Ande has with her husband and his family. Mom and Dad are even considering building in the same cul-de-sac.”
“But they just built.” Shayne frowned.
“True,” I agreed. “But they’re hoping that all these grandbabies will start happening now that Quincy and Quaid have found people.”
Quincy was less recent than Quaid, but there was definitely something going on that was serious between him and his girl, Ellodie.
“Ahh,” she laughed as she pulled out her keys and opened the door.
I fuckin’ hated her place.
Mostly because I couldn’t stand knowing that she was living with a gang banger and a drug dealer.
The only good thing I could say was that when Shayne was home, Costas mostly wasn’t.
We went straight to her room, bypassing everything.
I couldn’t say that I went to her place all that much. In fact, the last time I’d been here had been the day her Nonna had died.
But there was just something incredibly eerie about it.
Like without her Nonna here, the place wasn’t the same.
I wasn’t quite sure I should even be here, since there was a raid being run on her house the next day.
Fuck.
I really needed to warn her in some way.
But the moment we got into her room, the food was all but forgotten.
She turned, her foot caught on the rug, and then she was careening toward me.
I dropped the food almost out of instinct, caught her up in my arms, and pulled her into me.
She blinked in surprise, then we were kissing.
I’m not sure who moved first.
Her or me, it didn’t matter.
What did matter was the way she felt in my arms.
The way her mouth tasted like mine.
The way she was pressing into me deeply, urging me to take what was mine. What had been mine forever.
I knew, without a single doubt, that we both belonged to each other. Neither one of us had ever slept with anyone since we’d met.
I was hers, irrevocably and inconceivably.
Body, heart, and soul, I belonged to her.
I just needed her to admit it to herself…
Her hands went to the tails of my shirt, and then she was tugging it off of me, ripping it inside out and tossing it to the floor in her haste to get to me.
I followed suit with her shirt, then my pants went, dropping to the floor to pile around my boots.
Her stuffy pilot clothes all went sailing, and then she was naked and willing in my arms.
Our mouths collided once again, and I had to do a weird waddle to the bed to keep from falling face first into the ground, her underneath me.